Full Description
This book offers a defence of ethical reading in secondary school English classes at a time when reformers and policy makers are trying to reorganize English language arts around technical skills or politics. Ross Collin shows how students and teachers use literature as a venue for exploring their own and others' ethical ideas and practices and argues that moral inquiry in English class is a distinctly social endeavour. The book draws ideas from English education and moral philosophy. From English education, Collin explores social reading, or what Louise Rosenblatt named 'transaction', looking at texts commonly taught in secondary school English, including Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and Jacqueline Woodson's Brown Girl Dreaming. From philosophy, he draws on arguments about moral vision and literature developed by Iris Murdoch, Martha Nussbaum, and Nora Hämäläinen, and develops ideas, tacit in English education, about reading with moral vision. He concludes by proposing a new theory of moral vision in transactional reading.
Contents
Introduction: Ethical Inquiry in English Class
Part I: Social Dynamics of Moral Vision
1. Reading Romeo and Juliet in a Transactional English Class
2. Hearing Our Stories from Others: Reading Brown Girl Dreaming
Part II: Seeing Reality and its Moral Dimensions
3. Perfecting Moral Concepts with Iris Murdoch and Sophocles
4. Beyond Quandary Ethics in A Raisin in the Sun
Part III: Refocusing and Expanding Moral Vision
5. Who Cares and How in Ghetto Cowboy
6. Seeing Mice and Men Inside Ethics
Conclusion: Defending Ethical Inquiry in English Class
References
Index
